It is supremely ironic that the American Revolution hailed by many of today's libertarians and so-called conservatives as the great breakthrough for Liberty is the every event that destroyed the largely privatized social order of colonial America, in which private bodies performed many of the functions now performed by the State governments. The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the American Revolution, Gordon S. Wood, describes the rise of big government in the new States after the Revolution and because of it:

"Almost at a stroke the Revolution destroyed all the earlier talk of paternal or maternal government, filial allegiance and mutual contractual obligations between rulers and ruled..... As sovereign expressions of the popular will, these new republican governments acquired an autonomous public power their monarchical predecessors never possessed or even claimed.... The republican state governments sought to assert their newly enhanced public power in direct and unprecedented ways-doing for themselves what they had earlier commissioned private persons to do. They carved out exclusively public spheres of action and responsibility where none had existed before. They now drew up plans for improving everything from trade and commerce to roads and waterworks and helped to create a science of political economy for Americans. And they formed their own public organizations with paid professional staffs supported by tax money, not private labor.... The power of the state to take private property was now viewed as virtually unlimited--as long as the property was taken for exclusively public purposes." [1]

If the teaching of the Church were heeded, something like the "corporatist" society of Christendom, the remnants of which were evident in Protestant colonial America, would reemerge. One historian admitted that in Catholic social order the king "possessed certain customary rights, but could not define his own powers at will, or overturn the customary rights of the people or of the various subsidiary bodies of society." [2]

The return of subsidiary social bodies to provide what are now governmental services would be the natural consequence of respecting subsidiarity. And, accordingly, state taxation, like federal taxation, would be dramatically reduced, with any revenues devoted predominantly to the maintenance of essential public services, police and fire departments, roads, bridges, and parks.

The greatest tax reduction would result from returning education to where it belongs: under the control of the family. The enemies of Christ and His Church have always sought to impose public education on the masses, especially in Catholic France, where Masonic politicians battled for nearly a century to establish a public educational system. Thomas Jefferson dreamt of a public school system in America and saw a secular public education like that at his University of Virginia, the first university in Western history with no integrated theology curriculum, to be essential for the formation of citizens who would "think republican thoughts" and "support the cause of liberty as he understood it." [3]

Knowing precisely what the proponents of public education have always intended, the Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX condemns as one of the signal errors of our time the proposition that "The best theory of civil society requires that popular schools open to children of every class of the people... should be freed from all ecclesiastical authority, control and interference, and should be fully subjected to the civil and political power at the pleasure of the rulers, and according to the standard of the prevalent opinions of the age." [4]

Accordingly, in the Catholic state we are sketching, state and local taxes would not finance a public education system. It would simply disappear.